Authored by Jacob Ambrose Willson, Senior Editor, Criticaleye

Jo Baker’s fondness for the RAC dates back to a succession of unreliable cars she owned growing up, and subsequently “being rescued on a number of occasions by our orange friends”, as she recalls, speaking to Criticaleye not long after entering the ninth year of her tenure as CFO of the UK driving services provider.

Starting from a career in investment banking, Jo eventually moved to Barclays in the corporate development team before being offered a first financial director role by the then CFO of Barclays, Philip McHugh. After staying just over a decade in various roles at the bank, she left in 2014 to become UK CFO at the global payments provider, Worldpay.
 

Three years later, Jo secured a Group CFO position for the first time, at the UK payday lender, Wonga, which was backed by VC investors and in the middle of a major strategic turnaround. Not long after came the RAC opportunity, which ultimately proved too tempting to turn down.
 

So, what was her remit upon taking up the Group CFO role at one of the most well-respected brands in the UK? “At the time, it was a really strong business,” Jo recalls. “It was 120-something years old – this fantastic brand, great product, tremendous people, tremendous culture. It had been under PE ownership for about six years at that point.
 

“The RAC had gone through a change of ownership in 2016 and had been performing well – growing earnings, growing cash, but the topline growth had not been as strong.” At that point, the business was anchored around breakdown as the dominant product category, and the membership base had been fairly static for a few years, according to Jo.
 

“We think of ourselves as a subscription business. In any subscription business, membership growth is the lifeblood – that's what underpins your ability to deliver sustainable growth. So, the big challenge was how to inject some topline growth back into the business and look at how we could use that to accelerate and sustain the performance trajectory.”
 

That challenge seems to have been cracked in the years that followed Jo’s arrival at the business. A quick glance at the membership base for RAC reveals growth from 10.6 million members in 2018 to 15.5 million in 2025.
 

Changing Course
 

“More than that, we've expanded the business to become a unique ‘one stop shop’ for drivers. We're now focused not just on breakdown, but also insurance and SMR [Servicing, Maintenance and Repair]. These are the three most essential things that any driver needs. We call it the ‘holy trinity’ of driving services.”
 

Financial performance has also been a model of consistency throughout the last decade, with the company achieving its 14th consecutive year of EBITDA growth, as per its FY25 results. More importantly, topline growth has also been accelerating. Last year, RAC achieved seven percent revenue growth and 12 percent EBITDA growth despite a challenging macroeconomic environment.
 

“Whether it's Covid or some of the other recent macro pressures, I think we've demonstrated that ability to grow sustainably through the cycle, regardless of what the outside world throws at us. So, it's been, for a well-established business, quite an exciting and transformational past eight years or so,” Jo says.
 

These achievements have largely been a result of a remarkable level of stability across the executive team during the last near-decade. Group CEO Dave Hobday has been in role since February 2017, and had worked with Jo previously at Worldpay, providing the two with a strong foundation to build an effective partnership at RAC.
 

In her role as CFO, Jo reflects on the main ways in which she makes a difference to the success of the business: “Being CFO gives you this really privileged position where you get to see almost everything that's going on across the group, across different divisions, the functional side – be that risk, marketing, technology and so on.”
 

100-foot Thinking
 

Another way that Jo feels she contributes is by what she describes as “stretching the ambitions of the business and the leaders in the business” through the financial planning process and through making bets on some of the opportunities that lie ahead. One concept that helped crystallise Jo’s approach is called ‘100-foot thinking’, which she discovered during a strategy away day.
 

“If you have to get over a wall in front of you – let's say it's a two-foot-high wall. You don't really need to do anything different, you just need to work a bit harder or run a bit faster. But if it's a 100-foot wall, suddenly you need to think completely differently. Reframe your approach. Change the way you think about the tools you have at your disposal and be a lot more innovative. It's an idea that really stuck with me.”
 

This thinking has gone a long way to shape some of the changes that have been delivered across the business over the last several years, including the application and development of technology to further enhance the company’s customer offering. Every day, RAC handles around 7,000 breakdowns, and every one of those requires decisions to be made about what resource to send, what needs to happen at the scene and more.
 

“Those are the things that really can be massively improved by the application of AI and data science,” Jo says. “We're well advanced in that journey. We've got a great in-house team who have a number of tools and decision engines that we're using now across the business – from pricing, to operational deployment, to how we answer the phones.
 

“It’s really exciting, and you start to see that reflected in the performance of the business,” she continues. “The margins have really increased over the last 18 months – a lot of that is down to how we're finding new ways to apply technology and innovation.”
 

RAC is currently backed by three large private equity investors – CVC, GIC and Silver Lake Partners. CVC and Singapore’s GIC have been invested in the business for about a decade, while Silver Lake came on board in 2022. All three have been instrumental in supporting the growth ambitions of the business, according to Jo: “Importantly they have brought a focus on long-term value creation for the business, stability, really strong support and good challenge.
 

“But you can see the success of that partnership reflected in the results. When CVC invested in 2016, we were about £500 million revenue. Last year [2025], we saw an increase in revenue to £840 million. So it goes back to that point about really accelerating the topline growth.”
 

Silver Lake in particular have been hugely beneficial in helping the business accelerate innovation relating to AI and data analytics, being one of the world’s largest technology-focused investors. “That progress has been enhanced by their experiences of working with cutting-edge tech companies in their portfolio. They brought some of that thinking, that focus and that clarity to what was on our roadmap – that's really allowed us to go faster.”
 

The Journey Continues
 

Overall, Jo and Dave have forged a strong partnership with the PE investors, who continue to push the leadership team for further growth and iteration of a strategy that is clearly working. Reflecting on the achievements made by the business in recent years, Jo says: “We’ve built really good momentum in the business, and it's the sustainability of that growth that I'm most proud of.
 

“It's very easy to deliver great results for a year or have a bit of a ‘flash in the pan’. But to be able to sustain that performance, as we have done since I joined and for the last 14 years, and still have runway ahead is what’s most pleasing when I step back from the day job.”
 

With Jo’s help over the last eight years, RAC has established a financial track record to be envied across the UK corporate sector, along with product diversification and a tech-driven transformation. The challenge now is for the business to keep its foot on the accelerator, building on that momentum to become the UK’s number one driving services leader.